Orthodox Pascha Explained: Why the Date Differs and How the Feast Unfolds

Your neighbors have finished their chocolate eggs, the supermarket shelf is discounted — and the Orthodox family down the street has not even started Holy Week. If you have wondered why Orthodox Easter so often lands on a different Sunday, nobody moved the feast. Two calendars and one ancient rule are doing the counting.

Orthodox Christians call the feast Pascha, from the Greek word for Passover, and regard it as the feast of feasts. Here is why the date differs, and what the week looks like from inside.

Why the date is often different

East and West start from the same ancient formula: the Council of Nicaea in 325 settled that Pascha falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Both still use that rule; the difference is in the instruments.

Western churches calculate using the Gregorian calendar — the calendar on your phone — with the equinox fixed at March 21. Orthodox churches calculate using the older Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind, taking the equinox as March 21 on that reckoning: April 3 in everyday terms. The "full moon" in both cases is an ecclesiastical moon worked out from tables, not the moon in the sky, and the Orthodox tables differ too.

One more piece matters deeply to Orthodox Christians: the tradition that Pascha should fall after Jewish Passover — the order of the first Holy Week itself, kept in the calculation ever since. This rule most often stretches the gap, since Passover follows the Jewish lunar calendar and can fall well into April.

Put it together and Orthodox Pascha can land from about a week to five weeks after Western Easter. Some years, the calculations converge and everyone celebrates together.

Holy Week, service by service

The week is dense with services, many held in the evening and "anticipated" — belonging liturgically to the following day.

The Bridegroom services

On the evenings of Palm Sunday, Holy Monday, and Holy Tuesday come the Bridegroom services, named for the hymn "Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight" and for the icon of Christ in the crown of thorns in the church's center. The readings dwell on watchfulness — the wise and foolish virgins with their lamps — and the church is often dim. People who attend one weekday service all year frequently choose these.

Holy Thursday: the Twelve Gospels

Thursday evening brings one of the year's longest services. Twelve Gospel readings walk slowly through the account of Christ's suffering — the Last Supper, the foot-washing, Gethsemane, the betrayal, the trials, the crucifixion — bells tolling between them, worshippers standing with candles.

Holy Friday: the epitaphios

On Friday the church sets out the epitaphios, an embroidered cloth icon of Christ laid in the tomb, covered in flowers. At the evening service it is carried around the block, the congregation following with candles in a solemn re-enactment of a burial procession; in Greek neighborhoods, whole districts join in. Back inside, worshippers pass beneath the raised epitaphios — passing, with Christ, through death.

Holy Saturday

Saturday holds a strange, suspended joy. A morning service mixes funeral laments with resurrection readings; in many parishes the dark cloths are changed to white midway. Then everything goes quiet. The feast is coming — at midnight.

The midnight service

Late Saturday night the church fills, and the service begins in near-darkness, lit by candles and vigil lamps. Near midnight the lights go out. Then the priest emerges from behind the altar with a single flame, singing "Come, receive the light," and the flame passes from candle to candle until the dark building is full of small lights.

A procession circles the church, and at the doors — symbolically, the doors of the tomb — comes the announcement, sung and shouted: "Christ is risen!" The response rolls back: "Truly He is risen!" Not once, and not in one language: the exchange repeats in Greek, Slavonic, Arabic, Romanian, English, and whatever languages the congregation carries, each time louder, under ringing bells. St. John Chrysostom's Easter sermon, read aloud every year, invites everyone — those who fasted all of Lent and those who arrived at the eleventh hour — alike.

To follow this week's readings at your own pace, see the Explore the Orthodox track in Faith Map section — reading and lessons are free.

Red eggs

In the days before Pascha, Orthodox households dye eggs — traditionally on Holy Thursday — and they dye them red: red for blood and sacrifice, and red for life — resurrection breaking from a shell as new life breaks from a tomb.

Attached to the eggs is a beloved story about Mary Magdalene. As the tradition is told, she was granted an audience in Rome with the emperor Tiberius. Holding a plain egg as she told him of Christ risen, she heard him scoff that a man could no more rise than the egg in her hand could turn red — whereupon, in the telling, it turned red. Orthodox Christians recount this as tradition, a treasured account rather than a documented event — which is why it lives on eggshells and in kitchens, not in creeds.

The eggs are blessed after the midnight service, cracked against a neighbor's egg with the Paschal greeting — the uncracked egg takes the bragging rights — and eaten to break the fast.

Breaking the fast

Great Lent is a genuine fast: weeks without meat, dairy, or eggs. So the first meal after the midnight service is an event — gentle on a fasting stomach, and celebratory.

In Greek practice, the centerpiece is magyritsa, a soup of lamb offal, rice, and egg-lemon sauce with spring herbs, eaten in the small hours with red eggs and sweet braided bread. In Slavic practice — Russian, Ukrainian, and others — the table holds kulich, a tall, yeasted Easter bread crowned with icing, and paskha, a molded pyramid of sweetened cheese stamped with XB, the Slavonic initials for "Christ is risen." Every household is quietly certain its version is the standard — and all say the same thing: the fast is over, the table is full again.

Bright Week

The week after Pascha is Bright Week, kept as one continuous feast day stretched across seven. The royal doors of the icon screen stand open all week, fasting is set aside entirely — even on Wednesday and Friday, when Orthodox practice normally fasts — and the services keep singing the Paschal hymns. In tradition, Holy Saturday's newly baptized once wore white garments all week — part of where the brightness got its name.

The different date, in the end, is no technicality: it is the arithmetic of a tradition that has counted this week the same way for a very long time — then celebrated it as the only week that matters.